Move Fast and Fix Things, The Inclusion Model.

“We’re all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.” Annie Proulx

In a recent post, I reviewed a?podcast interview with Professor Frances Frei ?in which, among other things, she expounded her take on DEI, suggesting we should rename it ‘IED’ because if you get inclusion right, the rest will follow. I vowed to read the book she wrote with Anne Morriss, Move Fast and Fix Things, which details the approach, and to report back with more detail. The result is below. I hope Frances and Anne will forgive me for presenting a mash-up of their text, not always with inverted commas, to help represent their vibe and ideas.?

Move Fast and Fix Things

The book outlines these highly qualified and experienced authors’ approaches to organisational change. Identify your problem, build trust, build inclusion, focus on telling a good story as a key to a productive culture (which I may return to in a future article) and finally address how to execute what you’ve developed fast. Their ideas about inclusion are presented as part of this change process.

They claim inclusion is a significant part of making any business more efficient because - “Inclusion creates a flywheel of trust that allows you to do everything else faster and better.”

“Among other payoffs, inclusion makes us smarter, more innovative, and more profitable. Inclusion increases our collective access to knowledge, which enables us to see our competitive landscape more clearly. Inclusion delivers all this (and more!) without hiring many new people or investing in expensive technology.”

“No other organisational upgrade you’re contemplating can compete with those kinds of returns,”

They offer the following evidence-based list:

Ten Delicious Findings on the Competitive Advantages of Inclusion

1. Inclusion helps you recruit good people.
2. Inclusion helps you retain good people.
3. Inclusion increases the engagement of your people.
4. Inclusion makes you more resilient.
5. Inclusion grows your marketplace.
6. Inclusion makes you more innovative.
7. Inclusion turns you into a better decision-maker.?
8. Inclusion helps you manage risk.

The trouble with inclusion

However, inclusion can quickly go wrong. People start focussing on getting a more diverse workforce but don’t do the inclusion work to ensure their more diverse teams can work well together.?

“Diversity is uncomfortable. I think it’s been sold in corporate training like it’s going to be nirvana. It’s not. It’s going to be more uncomfortable. But you’re going to get better results.”?

Kevin Nolan, CEO of GE Appliances

In other words, diversity and inclusion reap business rewards, but they need careful, active nurturing to ensure the change is functional.?

The Frei/Morriss Inclusion process

Frei and Morriss identify four stages on the journey to a culture of inclusion:?safe,?welcome,?celebrated,?and?championed, which they insist must be addressed in order. To quote:

• Safe. People feel physically, emotionally, and psychologically safe in the workplace, regardless of who they are.

• Welcome. People feel welcome in the workplace throughout the entire HR life cycle, regardless of who they are; they can bring an authentic version of themselves to shared workspaces without penalty.?

• Celebrated. People feel celebrated in the workplace because of who they are; they are rewarded for contributing their unique information, ideas, and perspectives to advance the organisation’s goals.?

• Championed. A culture of inclusion permeates the organisation; inclusion is seen as an ethical and competitive imperative, and there is minimal variability in the experience of belonging across individuals, teams, and functions.

It’s important to move people up “the Inclusion Dial” without moving anyone else down. The aim is to work towards a culture in which everyone is relaxed about being themselves at work and able to contribute to the max.?

Safety

In any large organisation, a small percentage of your colleagues feel unsafe coming to work. We want to make it physically and emotionally safe to be different, beginning by protecting and empowering the people most likely to experience an absence of safety.?

Female workers, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ employees have a higher risk of being sexually harassed in the workplace than other demographics. Colleagues in two or more of these categories are at the highest risk. Involve the people most at risk in co-producing the strategies designed to serve them. Be great allies to colleagues who have different experiences of safety. Bring grace, humility, and urgency to the task.

“How big a deal is psychological safety? We round it off to huge.”

“It’s our obligation as leaders to reduce and prevent serious workplace harms through training, empowerment, and a culture of truth and consequences. We must also create systems where people can surface harms with as much grace and speed as possible.”?

“Provide airtight assurances about privacy, retaliation, and other risks to speaking up.”

Welcome

Safety is essential, but it’s just the first step. Next, we move on to developing a culture where people feel welcome.?

“We’re often asked for a summary of how to build a workplace where everyone feels welcome. Our short answer is to recruit great people you don’t already know, give them interesting work, and invest in them as if your company’s future depends on it.”

“If they deserve a promotion, give it to them promptly. Don’t make them wait. Don’t make them go to a competitor to get the role, title, and decision rights they already earned on your watch. And in the name of all that is right and just in the world, pay them fairly and equitably for the work they do.”

What would a more welcoming HR life cycle look like? It would mean more actively recruiting in spaces where your out-groups - those identities that aren’t thriving - are in the majority.

They give the example of Duolingo, the language-learning app, which achieved a striking 50/50 gender ratio for new software engineers by making major changes to its recruiting strategy, including refusing to recruit at universities where fewer than 18 per cent of women are represented in computer science programs (the national average).

“Our own practical bias is to focus most of your energy on “supply side” opportunities at each stage of the HR life cycle, like more-inclusive recruiting, better training and mentoring, and more-equitable access to advancement opportunities.”

They recommend you chase down any uncomfortable demographic patterns in who’s getting recruited, developed, promoted, and retained and examine the root cause of any trends you find.?

There is a warning - DEI analytics must be thoughtfully timed and skilfully used because diverse slates and hiring quotas can breed cynicism. There’s not much suggestion as to how to counter this, though.?

Celebrate

Your next inclusion milestone ensures your teammates feel celebrated because of their uniqueness, being seen and valued for being Tom.

Welcome everyone despite their differences. Celebrate uniqueness on your team—champion uniqueness at the scale of the organisation. Include yourself, too.?

An organisation that celebrates uniqueness assumes that difference is a source of creativity, innovation, and strength.

At Microsoft, inclusion was one of their three strategic can’t-get-it-wrong priorities. One of their innovations was to measure how much you contribute to other people’s success.

People tend to experience ‘celebrated’ in the intimacy of teams. You’ll likely find a clumping of ‘celebrated’ around a few great managers. Managers who set high standards and demonstrate deep devotion. They recommend looking at these managers, seeking patterns in what’s contributing to people feeling seen, valued and included and then working to turn these patterns into norms.?

Championed

“The final frontier in building an inclusive organisation is for the celebration of difference to become so ingrained institutionally that people feel championed for their uniqueness, with minimal variability across individuals, teams, and functions.”

Lars Fruergaard J?rgensen, president and CEO of the global pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, remarked -?

“We’re not down - prioritising Danish men in light blue shirts, […] We are giving everyone the same opportunities, and that will create … more opportunities for all of us, compared to [perpetuating] a tunnel view and [missing] the diversity of the opportunity out there… It’s actually making all of us stronger.”

Drama for Change

How does Drama for Change fit into all this? Here’s an example - just now, we are working on a suite of videos for a large organisation to help people better understand their neurodiverse colleagues. We are consulting with some of their neurodiverse employees and a neurodiversity consultant. Our cast is neurodiverse. We are producing three short video dramas, plus a 360 piece to simulate some of the unique sensory phenomena neurodiverse people can experience.

The dramas feature subtle, funny and intriguing scenes depicting an autistic reaction to an intense colleague, the intense and insightful thought patterns of someone with ADHD and a client who needs special service provision because of his dyslexia.?

They will be viewed in small groups with leader notes to support reflective conversations. And, of course, the videos are part of the organisation’s wider programme of inclusion initiatives.?

What’s your take on the Frei and Morriss approach to inclusion?